St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Brookfield is expanding to include curriculum for high school students in the ninth through 12th grades at the start of the 2026-27 school year this fall.
Principal Kate Thoelke said the decision to expand beyond K-8 education was made last fall before she joined the school, 9035 Grant Ave., in January as an education consultant.
“At that point, the church and the school board had made the decision to move forward with seeing if there would be interest in the high school,” Thoelke told the Landmark. “We sat down and talked about setting up a plan for enrollment … Going to 12th grade is really necessary for a classical education so that [students] are well prepared for undergrad or whatever they plan to do after they’re finished with us.”
While some might expect a high school expansion to start with a freshman class that leads the way until they graduate and make room for the years below them, Thoelke said St. Paul’s is opening enrollment to all four high school grades due to the requests of the existing alumni community.
“One of the impetuses for starting this high school is that we have a fantastic alumni base, where the students who are currently in high school that graduated from St. Paul’s in Brookfield come back every single week and study together because they want to be on campus,” she said. “Having that kind of desire on the part of the children to be back and to be a part of what we’re doing, in some small way, and continue that work — it makes sense for the church to say, ‘We should provide this for them.’”
Thoelke said school administrators are expecting a minimum of five students per high school grade level in the fall, with room for up to 12 students per grade in the first year.
She said the school is planning to expand its roster of staff for both the existing K-8 grades and the new 9-12 grades with “some really reputable, wonderful teachers” who all have personal connections to St. Paul’s.
To round out the curriculum for junior and senior students, St. Paul’s is partnering with Concordia University Chicago, a private Lutheran university in River Forest, Thoelke said. Many of the school’s current faculty are Concordia graduates, including herself, she said.
“[Upperclassmen] will have dual-credit enrollment at Concordia University Chicago,” she said. “Our children will have the opportunity to go to their campus, learn alongside freshman in college or sophomores or older, in their labs, especially for sciences and math. There are also other areas where Concordia will be endorsing our teachers, so they’re also going to be able to gain college credit on our campus.”
She said the partnership should prepare St. Paul’s students for college even more than an Advanced Placement (AP) course would. High school students across the country can take college-level AP classes and earn college credit based on their performance on a test at the end of the year.
“Having that partnership for our children will be a benefit for everyone all the way around,” Thoelke said. “It will certainly save them a lot of money when you look at how much college in America costs.”
Meet the principal
Thoelke said she came on as the principal at St. Paul’s earlier this year when the school found itself in need of a new leader while she was consulting with them.
“One of my greatest joys is being able to lead a school like this and, for families, provide them with a very meaningful, enduring education that helps families to have a school that partners with them and all the hard work that they do,” she said. “Brookfield is such a lovely community.”
Thoelke said she moved to the area with her husband, John Thoelke, following his appointment in September as the vice president of finance and chief financial officer of Concordia University Chicago.
Thoelke graduated from Concordia in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a certification in parish music before earning her master’s in education administration there. Since then, she’s spent her career working in Lutheran schools around the country, from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Houston, Texas.
She said her first taste of Illinois came when she became a teacher at another chapter of St. Paul’s in Hamel, Illinois, a small town east of St. Louis with fewer than 1,000 people.
“They promoted me to principal while I was there, and we built that school. It had started at 13 [students], and when I left, it was around 80 students. We were having families move to the area, to this small, little, 800-person village, to attend this school,” she said.
Then, she moved to Houston to build up another Lutheran school, Our Savior, where she worked until she came to Brookfield.
“We built that school from 265 [students] to completely full. When I left in December, there were 411 [students]. It’s the largest classical Lutheran school in the nation,” she said.
With it being National Teacher Appreciation Week, Thoelke gave her thanks to the teaching staff she works with at St. Paul’s.
“I’ve had some of the best teachers to work with in the places that I’ve served, and now, coming here to Brookfield, we’ve got wonderful, educated, high-quality, caring teachers, and that is what’s going to continue to help Brookfield thrive,” she said. “What a blessing it is to have them and the benefits that our families in Brookfield are receiving as a result of that hard work.”
